The heterotopia of the palace in Abdo Khal’s Throwing Sparks (2009)

Abstract

This article endeavors to negotiate Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia in Abdo Khal’s Booker-Award winning novel Throwing Sparks (2009). The central premise of this article is to offer a new understanding of spatiality, constituted by the simultaneous existences of ‘other’ spaces, which can be viewed in their relations as proximate to, contradictory to, or even reflective of each other. In this novel, the Palace is a real and symbolic space and/or place which oscillates between oppressive homogeneity and individualized depravity. The Palace in Throwing Sparks is a representational temporality that embodies the demarcation and relation between the ‘private’ and the ‘public’, allowing for a new site of material spatiality. The rise of an interstitial (heterotopic) space to fill in between the public and the private is what characterizes the Palace in the novel. It allows for the emergence of a whole landscape of power politics driven by the ramifications of the space and affecting its inhabitants. Since this space is analyzable, its inhabitants are overshadowed by its grander aura. In the Palace, the body does not belong to the individual and his/her own will. It rather belongs to the ‘institutionalized’ volition of the Palace in which ‘docility’ rather than subjectivity and agency is what remains as a performative practice for the survival of its inhabitants.